Spoilers for El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie follow. You have been warned…
Last weekend, Netflix debuted El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, a feature-length follow-up to AMC’s acclaimed series Breaking Bad, which served as both an epilogue to the show, and a conclusion to the story of Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman.
And while Jesse got the happy ending that most fans were surely hoping for, creator Vince Gilligan has revealed that when he was developing El Camino, he originally planned a much darker ending for the character:
“I like irony in storytelling,” Gilligan tells Vulture. “I love ironic twists. Once I had set about coming up with this movie, for the longest time, I had it in my mind that the thing we wanted most to see was for Jesse to escape. And the thing he wanted most to do was escape. So I was trying to concoct a plot in which, hero that he is, he saves somebody else – somebody I would have introduced as a new character into the movie.”
“Because he’s such an innately heroic character in my mind, he saves someone at the end of the movie and he willfully gets himself caught knowing that it’ll save this other person,” he continued. “At the end of the movie, he’d be locked in a jail cell somewhere in Montana or someplace. And he would be at peace with it. It was all this very interior, emo-type, very dramatic stuff.”
SEE ALSO: Read our reviews of El Camino here and here
Gilligan went on to reveal that he opted to dump that ending after negative feedback from those around him, opting instead to have Jesse succeed in his plans to make it to Alaska for a fresh start. Are you glad that he changed his mind? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or reach out on our social channels @flickeringmyth…
